Nordic Crane Group

12 April 2011

Norway

Nordic Crane Group was set up exactly three years ago. The Stange land and Kynningsrud families came together to form this holding company on a 50:50 ownership basis for both families, and the names of the companies in the group have all changed to reflect this.

It is approximately 700km between where these two families are based, Stangeland from Stavanger on the West coast and Kynningsrud from Halden on the eastern border. Since the families joined, we cover the south coast of Sweden, from Malmo up to Gothenburg, and the whole coastline of Norway. We have over 30 locations in Norway and Sweden, but we will work anywhere in Scandinavia our customers want us to go.

The Norwegian oil market is mainly based from Stavanger all the way up the coast to the very north, and the Stangeland site was already in that market. Both families were looking to grow and needed more equipment to handle demand from the oil industry, both in Norway and Sweden. This also allowed us to bid for bigger jobs.

We work all across the construction industry, oil and gas sectors predominantly, but there’s nothing that we won’t do. We have our own engineering company, Nordic Crane Engineering, we have Nordic Crane installation in Sweden. We also have the company Nordic Crane Wind, based 150km south of Gothenburg in Sweden, which has two of our largest cranes, two 750t Liebherr LG 1750s.

We have two 600t Demag CC 2800s and 4 500t mobile cranes, a mixture of Liebherrs and Demags, in Nordic Crane Wind, with a few more 500 tonners elsewhere in the group.

Wind power projects are not as numerous in Norway yet as they are in Sweden; there we do quite a lot of work involving wind power.

In total, following the recent merger with TO Bull, we have approximately 500 vehicles, 350 cranes ranging from 750t to 30t, 50 lorry loaders and the rest are split between heavy transports and ordinary transports.

Most of our cranes are German made, so we have mainly Liebherr, Demag, Faun or Grove cranes. We also have six or seven Sennebogens for loading and unloading. We have several crawler cranes, eight of which were purchased last year as part of a merger, plus two LTR 1100s we gained from the acquisition of TO Bull. There are two Demag CC2800s, the LR 1300 300t crawler, a 280t crawler, and six 100t telescopic crawlers.

The whole company is just three years old, so we have done a lot in that time. When you have just bought a company the big job is to get synergy out of the whole group. 2010 was difficult, partially because the crane lorries have taken the market completely up to 80t mobile crane capacity class. So for the overall construction market it’s narrower, from 80t to 200t, that’s the range of cranes that they need mostly.

On the investment side, of course we see what is necessary, but now we are bigger we can move machines between companies in the group to where they are needed and get maximum synergy. That is what we are working on now.